Good morning, ProviderNation. Irving Stackpole is a man who is hard to impress. Stackpole, a veteran long term and post-acute care analyst who runs his own consulting firm in Boston, has already played Eeyore on providers’ chances in a bundled payment world, but earlier this week, he rang a fire bell in the night for the whole seniors housing sector.

“What’s amazing is the lack of caution,” Stackpole marvels, “despite the overall signs in the markets, and the devil-may-care attitude of some investors and developers. This may seem a troublesome detail, but occupancies are declining in most marketplace areas. The decline in occupancy isn’t because sales and marketing have collectively fallen asleep across the USA, it’s because the market for age-qualified individuals is declining.”

Demography As Destiny

For Stackpole, demography is destiny.

“From 1925 to 1945, birth rates in this country, and many parts of the world, plummeted due in large measure to the Great Depression and war,” he says. “These are the lowest birth rate years on record in the United States.”

But that’s also because “seniors housing,” as a sector of the economy, is only in its birth stages. (In 2009, for instance, not one of the nation’s largest real estate investment trusts bothered with seniors housing; today, three out of the top five do.)

On Tuesday, Ry, Denmark-based Pressalit Care announced that its height-adjustable toilet had won cUPC approval for the U.S. and Canada. cUPC is the Universal Plumbing Code. The announcement comes barely a week after a delegation of intrepid Americans traveled to Denmark to tour its long term and post-acute care sector; they returned with tales more wondrous than the Arabian Nights.